With his experience of British music festivals, Delius knew what Sibelius did not: that rehearsal time would be severely limited, especially on a concert that also included Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Bach’s Third “Brandenburg” Concerto, and Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.10 Conducting the rehearsals for the Fourth Symphony may have been a trying experience for Sibelius, with Bantock translating the composer’s directions to the orchestra, and Wood, the official conductor of the festival, shouting directions to the players from offstage.11 At the dress rehearsal, Newmarch sat next to Delius, who “drawled at intervals in his soft, rather nasal voice” the equivocal observation, “Damn it, this is not conventional music.”12 Even Newmarch admitted, “One can hardly say that the Fourth Symphony was received with public enthusiasm at its first performance.”13
To many musicians in the audience, however, including the young Philip Heseltine, who had not yet assumed the nom de plume Peter Warlock, the Fourth Symphony came as a decided contrast to Elgar’s The Music Makers and as a revelation. As Heseltine wrote on 2 October 1912:
Elgar’s new choral work . . . I did not like at all: it seemed to me “sound and fury signifying nothing.” . . . Elgar himself looked ill and care-worn, and conducted in a very listless manner, though at times a sort of nervous energy seemed to come over him for a minute or two. . . . Sibelius’ new symphony was by far the best event of the evening: it is absolutely original—quite in a class by itself and uninfluenced by anything, save Nature! . . . it is very strange and mysterious, but at the same time, a work of great beauty, which one would appreciate more and more on repeated hearings.14
In this letter dashed off to a friend the day after the concert, Heseltine anticipated the vocabulary that British critics would use to describe both the Fourth Symphony and Sibelius’s music in general: “absolutely original,” “uninfluenced by anything,” “nature,” and “great beauty.” Heseltine’s judgment was hardly infallible—he dismissed Gustav Holst in favor of the ephemeral Bernard van Dieren. However, in the case of Sibelius, just as with his later championship of Bartók, he was prescient. Whatever else happened during the Birmingham Festival of 1912, the premiere of the Fourth Symphony marked the point at which many forward-looking British musicians began to turn away from Elgar, a brooding Englishman, and seek inspiration from a brooding Finn.
This change in Sibelius’s status was not immediately apparent in press comments on the Fourth Symphony. Critical opinion was mixed, with the anonymous critic of the Times hedging his bets by praising the orchestration: “Sibelius brings a wealth of contrasted material; each instrument has a personality of its own; and that is why, although he uses an orchestra no bigger than that of Brahms’s First Symphony, the orchestration is almost disconcertingly new. He scarcely ever makes instruments of different colours do the same thing.” As Erik Tawaststjerna reported, “Other press comment was either guarded and respectful, as was, for example, the Musical Times, or directly uncomprehending, as was the Standard: ‘Mr. Sibelius’s music could be described as written in cypher and unfortunately he has omitted to provide us with the code.’”15
One critic fully grasped the score’s import, however. As Tawaststjerna averred, “Ernest Newman saw that greater severity and concentration of the symphony as part and parcel of a more widespread stylistic trend: Schoenberg, he argued, was trying to do much the same thing but without the same success. Perhaps without realizing it, Newman was sowing the seeds of one of the most bitter polemics of the post-war years.”16 Whatever else he was doing without realizing it, Newman sowed the seeds of his ironic riposte to Adorno years later: Newman’s approbation set the seal for acceptance of the Fourth Symphony into the British canon in a way that transcended applause of the hour.
Before delving into the deeper reasons for Sibelius’s British popularity, a crucial factor, perhaps obvious but rarely remarked on, must be acknowledged. For reasons that will be discussed over the course of this essay, Sibelius appeared in Britain at a most opportune historical moment. His special positioning cannot be gainsaid: after all, he was hardly the only major composer promoted by Rosa Newmarch. In 1926, for example, she arranged for the greatest living Czech composer, LeoŠ Janáek, to travel to Britain. But despite her enthusiasm and expertise in public relations, Janáek enjoyed only a fraction of Sibelius’s success with the British public.17 Like Sibelius before his first visit to England, Janáek was known among the cognoscenti: Píhody LiŠky BystrouŠky (Cunning Little Vixen), which he had heard in Prague during the 1924 ISCM Festival.18 Janáek’s posthumous reputation in Britain was secured decades later, but until very recently, his influence has been modest compared with that of Sibelius. The Czech was the right man but, unlike the Finn, for him it was the wrong time.
Questions of historical caprice aside, Newman’s high claims for the Fourth Symphony, which were echoed by younger writers such as Cecil Gray (1895–1951), Constant Lambert (1905–1951), and David Cherniavsky (1922–1954), indicate how much of a sea change had taken place. As Peter Franklin has observed, “Sibelius left England on 30 October 1912 almost as an honorary member of its musical avant-garde.”19 In any case, there were few if any dissenters from the general approbation of the Finnish composer during this era. Sibelius’s music subsequently has influenced British composers from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peter Maxwell Davies and has been performed often by conductors from Malcolm Sargent to Colin Davis. This investigation, however, focuses on the writings of a set of representative British critics in order to illuminate the several reasons that the Finnish composer became so important to English musical life during the interwar period.
Indeed, due to Newman, Gray, and Lambert, the Fourth Symphony became the most exalted part of a critically anointed trinity of Sibelian masterworks including the Seventh Symphony, op. 105 (1924) and the tone poem Tapiola, op. 112 (1926). British audiences, by contrast, were hard pressed to emulate Newman’s enthusiasm for the Fourth Symphony. Unlike Finlandia or the refulgent Second Symphony, op. 43 (1902), the Fourth never became a popular favorite: most concertgoers admired rather than loved this challenging work; it continues to be the least performed of Sibelius’s seven symphonies in England. In a review dated 28 March 1920, Newman bemoaned, “Sir Henry Wood and I seemed to be a minority of two in voting upon the Fourth Symphony. It appears to have bored everyone else with whom I have discussed it.” Newman continued defensively, “But if other people are merely bored by the gloom of dense sunless forests I cannot say them nay. I would ask them, however, to take a little interest in Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony on other grounds.”20 In a later essay published in 1937 titled “Sibelius no. 4: Its English History,” Newman claimed, “There can be no doubt that the cause of the temporary setback in the Sibelius vogue was the coming of the war fast upon the heels of the production of the fourth symphony . . . in 1912 the No. 4 was rather a tough nut for the English to crack.”21
Paradoxically, the lack of affection demonstrated by Newman’s “general music-lover” toward the symphony proved one of the reasons for its critical esteem. In the 1920s, nothing bestowed modernist credentials upon a work of art like public incomprehension. Gray viewed British middle-class audiences with undisguised contempt: “As for the musical public in general, the less said the better. On the rare occasions when one of Sibelius’s major works has been performed the reception has invariably been sullen and listless . . . the ‘plain man’ . . . simply will not listen to Sibelius at all—that is, to his best and most characteristic work.”22 But certain passages in the writings of both Gray and Newman provide a key to the reasons why the Finnish composer, unlike his less appreciated Czech contemporary, proved to be the right man at the right time for the British from 1912 until well after the Second World War.
A Man from the North
When Sibelius stepped ashore at Dover in 1905, he was welcomed, after a spot of unpleasantness in customs over some undeclared cigars, by a musical establishment that was in the throes of transition from an outmoded Wagnerian
notion of modernity to a nationalistic brand of British modernism based upon folksong, Tudor music, and self-conscious vitality. The trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 were a recent memory, and most British artists, who labored under strict social prejudices concerning those who engaged in the arts, had reacted decisively. (Although Wildean decadence never quite died out in Great Britain—as evinced by the careers of Lord Berners and Ronald Firbank, to cite only two examples—it went underground, often concealed in plain sight as what was knowingly called “eccentricity.”) For most artists, however, especially those heterosexuals who suffered from fits of “homosexual panic”—the fear of being taken for a homosexual—a wholesale retrenchment was in order, one that mandated Norfolk tweeds instead of velvet jackets; cakes and plain ale rather than oysters and scented wine; bracing tramps over the Malvern hills rather than languid games of dominoes at the Café Royale; and, in music, modally-inflected diatonicism rather than the Wagnerian chiaroscuro of chromaticism.23 Even Elgar, as indebted to Wagner as he was, encouraged younger British composers to create music that would be “something that shall grow out of our own soil, something broad, noble, chivalrous, healthy and above all, an out-of-door sort of spirit.”24 Note that in this exhortation, made during the course of the first public lecture in 1905 as Peyton Professor of Music at Birmingham University, Elgar uses the word healthy, a word that, like clean, possessed a distinct implication of controlled, sublimated, masculine heterosexuality. For Elgar and many of his contemporaries, achieving a “healthy” aesthetic for British music meant cultivating an “out-of-door sort of spirit”: the musical salvation of the younger generation could only be achieved if they eschewed the hothouse morbidity of decadence for the health promised by nature.25 Such concerns were part of a wider social anxiety concerning masculinity at a time when, as historian Dan Stone has observed, “the Edwardian period saw the emergence of fears of British decline, especially after the military shock of the Boer War and rapid German economic growth.”26
Ironically, Elgar’s friend Bantock, a purveyor of post-Wagnerian musical exoticism, was the person who invited Sibelius into British musical life, thus insuring the eclipse of Bantock’s own perfumed style. Rosa Newmarch, however, immediately grasped Sibelius’s potent appeal: “My fellow-guest proved to be a striking and characteristic example of a man from the North—a Viking type.” In her memories of this first encounter, Newmarch recalled that Sibelius’s hair was “the colour of oats in sunshine.” If this was not enough to signal his attractiveness, Newmarch continued rhapsodically by apostrophizing his “ice-blue eyes” and his “well set-up figure, neat and admirably tailored.”27 Indeed, Newmarch may even have felt a bit crestfallen that Sibelius “had nothing of the naiveté or rusticity of a man brought up in a small country.”28 Although mildly disappointed that the Finnish composer was not wearing hand-sewn boots made from reindeer pelts, Newmarch discerned quickly the quality in Sibelius that thrilled his British admirers: his evident, unforced masculinity.
Less inhibited than her male colleagues, Newmarch gets right to the point in delineating Sibelius’s masculine charisma. She does not hesitate to locate it in his music as well as his person, but the enthralled men reporting on the Finnish composer took refuge in metaphor. For Newman, Lambert, Gray and others, this musical Viking stood resolutely at the nexus of a whole series of British cultural tensions that they expressed through their writings by invoking a recurrent series of paradoxical binary oppositions. Sibelius was perceived as being at once a mystical pantheist and a rigorous, coldly calculating logician; as both a modernist and a classicist; as primitive as a rock and as modern as a machine; as utterly individual while being the voice of a race; and as being simultaneously without precedent and the rightful heir to the Beethovenian tradition. This inconsistency is striking now, but disturbed absolutely no one at the time. The vocabulary that Newman and other British critics employed is revelatory of both their attitudes and of the culture in which they flourished.
In his 1920 review of the Fourth Symphony, Newman’s use of metaphors drawn from nature to illustrate the Finnish composer’s aesthetic virility reaches a high point as he draws on the phallic symbolism inherent in prehistoric rocks. Newman’s use of such language marked a new approach to the composer’s music that emerged just after the First World War. Recall that Tawaststjerna’s citation of Newman’s 1912 account of the Fourth Symphony makes an invidious comparison between Sibelius’s brand of modernism and that of Schoenberg. By 1920, however, it appears that Newman was interested as much in geology as he was in modernity:
The new method has never been so successfully followed as in this Fourth Symphony. He disdains transition for transition’s sake: he lays theme endways to theme as the builders of some prehistoric walls or buildings may have laid stone upon stone, without mortar between them . . . Music like this seems to have no softening atmosphere about it, no aerial perspective; every theme springs abruptly out of the earth and challenges the ear to take it in at once and adjust it to its fellows . . . For my part I like the stark strength and prehistoric roughness of the style; but it will evidently take some time for the general music-lover to feel at home in it.29
Newman was not alone in alluding to natural phenomena such as the “stark strength and prehistoric roughness” of granitic themes springing “abruptly out of the earth” to describe the masculine quality that he felt characterized Sibelius’s music. In his biography of the composer, Gray expands to cosmic imagery when he contrasts the Fourth Symphony, which he likens to a dense “White Dwarf” star, with the Fifth, which he characterizes as a “Red Giant, a Betelgeuse of Music.”30 In Music Ho! Constant Lambert declared, “the climaxes of Tapiola and The Oceanides are a rising flood that carries all before it.”31 In a 1947 essay, Cherniavsky saw nature as the basis and source of Sibelius’s achievement: “His style tends to conform to the ways of Nature. I have already mentioned his almost pantheistic love of the natural world and the force with which its elemental power and beauty have stimulated his mood and inspiration; yet in truth this influence has delved far deeper, right down to the very roots of his expression . . . A trend which is far deeper and more essential to his style . . . is his basic insistence on organic form, on natural growth, on uninterrupted continuity of expression, on the attainment of balance; of unity within diversity, and on complete freedom of his own ideas to achieve their own development and seemingly inevitable fulfillment with the whole.”32
Gray is the most self-consciously iconoclastic of these critics; examples of absurd exaggerations and perplexing inconsistencies abound in his prose. In the adulatory pages on Sibelius found in his 1924 volume A Survey of Contemporary Music, Gray writes, “The key to both the strength and the weakness of Sibelius is to be found in his essentially primitive mentality—using the word primitive in its truest and best sense.” Gray opines that Debussy, Stravinsky, and Matisse are also primitives, but of the wrong sort: “They are ‘primitives’ from being hyper-civilized, super-cultured, over-refined. With them primitivism is simply a form of romanticism, like the cult of orientalism a hundred years ago.” He proceeds to contrast these “aesthetic primitives,” easily identifiable as “decadent” by their culture and refinement, with “the true primitives, such as Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Sibelius in music, or Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau in painting.” (Had Sibelius, a consummate professional, ever read Gray’s volume, one wonders how he would have reacted to being lumped together with two amateurs who rarely managed to finish a score unaided by Rimsky-Korsakov.) Gray asserts that these artists “are primitive not from any theoretic or sentimental yearnings, but simply because their minds are simple, direct, unsophisticated.” Gray goes on to further qualify Sibelius’s primitivism with a series of caveats:
The true primitive artist is irresistibly attracted to the great traditions and procedures from which the modern decadent endeavours constantly to escape . . . . If I call Sibelius a primitive, I do not intend to suggest that his work is necessarily crude, unfinished, or
technically incompetent. All I mean to imply by this misused adjective is a type of mind which works instinctively rather than consciously and intellectually; and, as the instincts of a primitive race are keener and surer than those of civilized races, so the resultant art has nothing of the clumsiness and uncertainty which we habitually associate with their workings.
Having twisted his prose into epistemological knots in an attempt to clarify his initial muddled assertion, Gray entangles himself further by adding: “Finally, it would be a mistake to imagine that I call Sibelius primitive because he happens to come from a country which stands somewhat off the beaten track.”33 Gray pays a convoluted tribute to Sibelius’s aesthetic virility—making him safe for manly British ears—by certifying that he is “simple, direct” and, the supreme accolade, “unsophisticated.” It comes as no surprise that Gray’s highest praise is reserved for the Fourth Symphony, which he describes as “effortless, natural, and inevitable.” The subtext is that, unlike Stravinsky, fatally compromised by his association with the decadence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, or Debussy, an epicene Frenchman, Sibelius is a paragon of virility who has escaped the taint of European decadence. The Finnish composer is “clean,” untouched by the compromised, confused present: “Sibelius seems to belong to a different race, a different age even; whether to the past or to the unborn future it would be difficult to say.”34
The Great Race
As flimsy and illogical as such assertions read today, Gray’s rhetorical stammering and equivocation unwittingly exposed a pervasive unease over a perceived loss of masculinity. With the popular conflation between effeminacy and homosexuality that came in the wake of the Wilde trials, being “hyper-civilized, super-cultured, over-refined” were conditions that would lead ineluctably to enervation, loss of virility, a propensity toward masturbation, and, finally, homosexuality. “Civilization” was commonly presumed to sap both an individual man and an entire nation. According to such authors as Max Nordau, the accelerating pace of modern life, and especially the sophistication of modern cities, contributed to the degeneration of masculinity.35 American sociologist George L. Mosse writes, “From the nineteenth century on, the guardians of nationalism and respectability felt menaced by the big city, the apparent center of an artificial and restless age. Such cities were thought to destroy man’s rootedness.” Cities were considered haunts of unnatural vice, for “it was further said that the extremes of luxury and poverty to be found in cities favored the practice of sexual deviance . . . When court cases concerning homosexuality were reported in the London press, the analogy to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah was almost always drawn.”36
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 19